Glitch. Part 17

Why was I so close?

Welcome back f.u.c.kwad.

The wall of the building loomed great, flat, and impossibly wide. Below, toy cars weaved the streets and tiny tops of hair trickled like sand in an hourgla.s.s down the sidewalks.

It played with my senses. It made me feel it was right-side up and I was hanging off of it like a little kid. And then, when I got used to that, it switched again. Now the wall loomed in front of me. I was an ant standing in front of something larger than I'd ever seen.

And the height. The yawning sensation of physics wanting you dead.

"Come on!" Lena shouted.

Josh looked side to side, like a dog sniffing out a dead thing. He looked down, tensed his legs again.

Jumped.

Josh landed a meter below the edge, safe and still on the air.

"I'm finding the bugs," he shouted at me. "Listen to Lena!"

"Come on!" Lena rolled her fingers. The invisible plane of non-gravity continued to hold her up.

I closed my eyes and raised my foot to the ledge.

f.u.c.k it.

I jumped.

I hung in the air for an impossibly long second. I worried the wind would sweep me away, blast me into the streets and a pile of mashed organs.

But then I felt the tug of gravity. And as my feet drew level with Lena's, it stopped. I didn't feel a landing, or any hint of a surface-I just stopped moving.

I opened my eyes. Lena smiled. Amrith bit his lip and nodded.

"We call this type of glitch a platform!" Lena shouted. "Easier to say than invisible floor!"

I looked down. I wish I didn't.

Amrith and Laurent jumped down to Josh's level. Josh bent down and pulled something from his hoodie-the pocketknife he'd used back in Level Zero. He flipped it open. The sun flashed in the steel. Josh held it down.

"And this-" Lena grabbed my hand and pulled me down to the lower platform. I felt a bit dizzy-like I had two bodies moving at different speeds-but when my feet planted down I felt better.

Josh ran the knife along the air. A blue line glowed where it went. He curved the line and made it pierce itself.

The sigil flashed, and turned a deep, dark red.

Josh put his hand on the mark.

"What does-" I began, and stopped because I was screaming too hard to think.

Colors flashed and I realized they were buildings blurring in our speed. I couldn't hear myself. I couldn't hear anything. I thought my eardrums burst.

The landscape drifted with sickening speed. We pa.s.sed the sun and its superheated shine blazed all the vision out my eyes. All I saw was the shadows of the others-crouched in place.

Only Laurent moved. He gripped his aluminum bat, held it ready, and looked at Josh.

Josh nodded. He took away his hand. The symbol he'd carved glowed in the air like a sickness.

Laurent brought the bat down.

The sign turned blue.

And vanished.

My vision blackened. I saw blue skies. Then green trees. Then silver light.

Sound came back. I heard the roar of wind in my ears. I couldn't breath.

The trees were getting closer.

"We call that glitch *dropping'" Lena said.

The forest around us hummed with buzzing insects. Tiny green bugs spiraled up and corkscrewed down. Birds tweeted, squirrels rustled, and a deer ran very, very quickly from us. In the distance, freeway traffic rumbled.

I looked at the tree we'd crashed into.

The poor thing bent onto the ground-the trunk a pulp of splinters and ruined wood. A deep score marked the earth where we'd kept going until grinding to a halt.

Josh said we'd fallen about half a kilometer out of the sky, with the acc.u.mulated speed far exceeding normal terminal velocity of a hundred miles per second.

And yet, when we'd pried ourselves out of our landing-hole, my clothes weren't even ripped. My soft white t-shirt still held its immaculate color, and my dark blue track pants still smelled slightly of clean laundry.

My socks were the only part of me that had suffered. They'd turned muddy and twiggy on the forest floor. I looked at them disgusted. They squelched in the dirt.

My feet hurt. I looked around and found a thin white log scoured with yellow-brown fungus. I hopped over and sat down on it.

"See," Lena began. "Laurent says that there're these things called gluons. They don't exist in Level Zero, so when you twist a gate you can sort of make the world forget about them for a while. Then when we turn physics back on we remain sorta immune to kinetic damage until our external force is equalized."

"You're so good at sounding smart Lena," Laurent said from the ruined tree. He dangled from a tree branch that now stuck vertically in the air, a foot above the ground. He dropped, and thunked onto the dirt. Lena gave Laurent the finger.

Amrith was throwing up in a bush a little way away. For the past five minutes he'd done it in quick, business-like hurks.

When he finished, he came out of the bushes and spat the last of it against a tree.

"So anyway we're a bit boned," Laurent told me. "I think we landed somewhere near Newmarket. Normally we'd open up a gate and get back by walking through Level Zero, but I don't think there's enough action here to do that."

My socks would be ruined after this, I concluded. When I got home, I was going to buy a big bag of socks. Fresh socks, ripped right out from the packaging with the scent of polymers still clinging to the fabric. That was just excellent stuff.

"Uh, I saw Josh on the phone. We might be able to get a cab." Amrith mumbled, wiping his mouth."

I'd go with grey socks. The fancy ones with the padding at the heels for extra odor absorption. Not that I had an odor problem.

Laurent shook his head. "Man you do those crazy backflip things but you can't take a little drop."

"It's different," Amrith said, coughing. "Very different."

"Amrith and Lena do this crazy parcour stuff," Laurent mentioned to me. "That was actually how we got them. See we needed some fit people to run some tests in Level Zero while Josh and I-"

"I'd like new track pants too," I murmured to myself. "Roots has good ones."

Lena, Amrith and Laurent looked at each other.

"You okay man?" Laurent asked.

"I'd like new socks," I said to the ground. "When we get back to Toronto."

"... Cool." Laurent said. He looked at Lena and shrugged. "Socks are cool."

"Oh man," Amrith clutched his stomach. He turned and stumbled back to the vomit-bush.

Far away, Josh railed on a cell phone. "We're right on off-ramp. You can't miss it. No. No. We were just-no. Come on!"

I took a big breath of woody, loamy air. The air had flavor out here, with a bitter edge from the highway exhaust.

It was getting dark. The rim of the sky blazed orange, but the dome was darkening. An impossibly thin crescent moon hung small and distant above us. The woods hid the setting sun. I could almost see the stars.

"Um," Lena said. "So, your Stalker Man-"

My Stalker Man?

"We probably confused it when we broke the gate. I'd guess you have about a month, maybe more time depending on how smart it is."

Laurent sat down in the leaves. Twigs snapped under his a.s.s.

In the distance, Josh swore himself hoa.r.s.e. He finished the call with a reedy, "f.u.c.k you!" and almost threw the phone away.

Josh stalked towards us wordlessly.

"So before that we're gonna have to meet Haze," Lena told me. She held her hands clasped like a doctor delivering bad news. Behind her, Josh sat down and glowered at the dirt. "We'll explain everything, and then he'll tell you how to undo the mark."

"We just fell. From half the height of the CN tower. My socks are dirty," I said. I lifted a leg for emphasis.

"You've gotta cut that out soon," Josh said. "It's only gonna get weirder. A drop is nothing."

"f.u.c.k! Youuu!" Amrith called from the bushes.

"Anyway I managed to get a cab," Josh said. "Two of them."

"We'll be in touch," Lena said. "We'll bring you to Haze on Sat.u.r.day. Before that you'll have to get some things."

"Socks." I said.

"Alright, I'm not riding with this guy," Josh said.

I thought about Level Zero on the ride back. It beat Amrith and Lena, talking alternately about parcour, internet memes, and the release of Ma.s.s Effect 3.

"You know the best name?" Lena asked. "German. German Shepard!" Amrith laughed. He slapped his thighs which I thought was a bit overboard. But then again, he'd carefully positioned himself next to Lena on the way over, inviting me to take the cab's shotgun seat.

The cab driver snorted at me as I entered the car. My dirty socks and overall glazed expression didn't invite much respect I guess. I ignored him, and did my best not to let the dirt sc.r.a.pe off into the car.

Level Zero-Laurent said-was an alien world. Dark and different.

It had its own rules, and developed by its own laws. Its creatures were strange-more thoughts than matter. Humans were not exactly welcome, and neither were our physics.

And now, according to Laurent, the stalker man that had marked me was wandering the real world. It had no power. It couldn't see, hear, or move anything without access to a gate. It would wander the city blind, deaf, and dumb, until it found a gate to enter Until then, I could prepare. I could wander Level Zero in relative safety, I could learn from Lena, Laurent, and the others.

"Urdnot just has style though," Amrith said from the back.

"Urdnot Shepard kicks a.s.s," Lena agreed.

We came closer and closer to Toronto. The highway stretched awesomely flat, like G.o.d's kitchen table, in front of us. A row of power-stations followed us.

The stars were out, bigger and brighter than anyone saw in the city. Dollars and cents added in orange light on the cab's dashboard.

"Commander Shepard never retreats, he just attacks in the opposite direction."

The city loomed ahead of us. I could see the CN Tower already. The cab's clock read 11: 03 pm. I'd have to take the last GO bus back to my place at Long Branch.

Level Zero and the stalker men were becoming a task in my mind-another check on a to-do list.

That felt good. It felt normal. It felt like I could end this wierdness and go back to blogging.